Show Season

Here we are in August already, and in the words of George Mackay Brown*, 'The "Show Season" is on us once more. How quickly the cycle of the year turns!'.

Stromness Library will be closed on Thursday 7th August for the annual public holiday for the Dounby Show. As ever the hope is that the weather will be kind. 

Writing forty years ago, in The Orcadian , George Mackay Brown was both looking forward to the delights of 'The Show Season' and reflecting on memories of Dounby Shows past:

...may the Dounby Show be blessed this year with sunshine and tumultuous crowds. Here, if anywhere, it is possible to see, gathered into one small field, a swatch of the typical Orkney - laird, merchant, farmer, seaman, countrywoman, student, bairn...

If I try to think of any one happy Dounby Show out of the past, it is almost impossible, for all those August days unfold like a single fan covered with gay patterns. Even when the gate is finally closed in the show park, and the patient beasts are loaded for home, the day keeps an afterglow. 

Whatever the weather may bring on Thursday we hope your day out at the Dounby Show is full of happy memories.



* quotes from George Mackay Brown, 'The Show Season, 8.8.1974' in Letters from Hamnavoe, 2002,Steve Savage Publishers Ltd, p.166. 

Hallowe'en

The Stromness Library Reading Group meets tonight to discuss Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, a suitably dark text for our Hallowe'en meeting!

In the days before pumpkins and 'trick or treat' came to Stromness, children could look forward to some equally tasty, though slightly healthier treats, as George Mackay Brown recalls in Letters From Hamnavoe: 

The old wooden tub was taken out of the shed and set squarely on the flagstone floor. It was threequarters filled with water; maybe a kettleful of hot water was added to take the chill off. Then a poke bursting with apples was emptied into the tub, where they tossed and eddied and collided with each other - ruddy fragrant spheres .

 There were other seasonal treats too:

I have only a vague memory of what we did with the nuts - whether they were 'dooked' for too, or simply shared out - walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts thinly scattered among a huge profusion of monkey nuts.

There were one  or two variations; as when an apple coated with syrup was suspended from a rafter and the object of the exercise was to take a bite out of it. It was not so easy either, and meantime, cheeks and foreheads got stickier and stickier...

We can remember doing something similar as children, with pancakes spread with syrup or treacle, hanging from a string, which had to be eaten without the use of your hands. Yummy but messy!

The origins of such traditions are lost to time, but as GMB points out:

There must certainly be some reason rooted in old magic for these rituals. Of course the apples and the nuts marked the consummation of the fruitful year. Ahead stretched the gauntness and snows of winter.

It would be good to hear your memories of Hallowe'en traditions from previous generations - please feel free to add them as a comment below this post.

 image from http://thebestheartsarecrunchy.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/bobbing-for-apples.html